Luigi Ghirri’s Puglia. Tra albe e tramonti gathers photographs made in Puglia, the region at the heel of Italy that became pivotal to his career after his first visit in 1982. He returned almost every year over the following decade, photographing, exhibiting, and refining his understanding of a place whose visual character is at once sharply particular and quietly elusive. Published by MACK in 2022, this 288-page first edition presents that sustained engagement in a substantial bilingual volume, with texts by Adele Ghirri and Arturo Carlo Quintavalle.

The book’s Puglia is encountered through the signs and surfaces of everyday life: whitewashed streets, doorways and arches, potted cacti, beaches, funfairs, and the traces left by both residents and visitors. Ghirri’s attention moves between urban texture and incidental association, finding visual coincidence in details that might otherwise pass unnoticed. The photographs are made in colour, and their tonal world is closely bound to the region’s light: the bright sun of Southern Italy, the eloquence of cast shadows, and the altered atmosphere of neon and streetlights after dark.

Almost all of the images are described by the publisher as little-known and previously unpublished. That fact gives the collection particular importance within Ghirri’s work, but the book’s value does not depend on disclosure alone. Its distinctive quality lies in the patient accumulation of observations across repeated visits, allowing Puglia to emerge not as a picturesque backdrop or fixed destination, but as a territory shaped by use, memory, hospitality, and seasonal movement. The volume also records the creative and intellectual milieu Ghirri found there: the artists, critics, and curators who became friends and collaborators.

For collectors of Ghirri and of postwar Italian colour photography, Puglia. Tra albe e tramonti offers a focused account of a formative relationship and a less familiar body of work. Its sequence joins atmosphere to close observation, while its accompanying texts extend the book beyond a portfolio into a considered portrait of place. The printed paperback, issued with a jacket of pre-dyed paper and a tipped-in image, reinforces the publication’s carefully composed character without distracting from the photographs themselves.